free software (Blog)http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/term/824/0
enThe wonderful and terrifying implications of computers that can learnhttp://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/deep-learning-implications
<p>Watch this. It&#39;s a TED talk on Deep Learning AI algorithms:</p>
<iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/t4kyRyKyOpo?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p>I think the presenter is overhyping the implications of the technology in the short term. But in the longer term, he&#39;s right. Software is eating the world, AI is disrupting the value of human labor (starting with unskilled labor and gradually moving upstream) and those jobs are never coming back.</p>
<p>This is going to accelerate income disparities and the gap between the rich and the poor. Society on the whole will be much richer however so the quality of life for the disenfranchised may not actually drop.</p>
<p>How this will play out depends a lot on politics. Richer societies can expand the public sector and lobby heavier taxes on the private sector to provide a minimum standard of living for the unemployed masses which is probably what we&#39;ll see happen in countries with a social capitalist bent (e.g., many parts of Europe).</p>
<p>Or it could be the other way around. Government shrinks, corporate power rises along with investments in increasingly effective security, surveillance, policing technologies to keep the disenfranchised in tow. Which is probably what we&#39;re already seeing happen in the US.</p>
<p>Or there might be a third scenario: government power erodes, private power rises, but the power of non-government anarchic commons movement also rises in the style and spirit of the free software movement to democratize access to new technologies (e.g., think self replicating free 3d printers). That could save the world from the claws of corporatist dystopia where the super-rich own everything and a big part of the population has no value in the economy because their jobs are done better and faster by AIs.</p>
<p>The cost of physical goods will never be as low as digital products because you need energy and raw materials to reproduce them, but it could be close enough to free so that people who are unemployed and have no value in the economy can still enjoy a better standard of living than they have now. Also, the cost of living will drop once people migrate increasing portions of their lives &quot;online&quot;. Virtual reality technology that is indistinguishable from the real thing will eventually be free / ad-supported.</p>http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/deep-learning-implications#commentsaifree softwareMon, 05 Jan 2015 07:42:27 +0000Liraz Siri16643 at http://www.turnkeylinux.orgNo Juju for you! Ubuntu's Not Invented Here syndromehttp://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/ubuntu-not-invented-here-syndrome
<p>Today Brian emailed me to share his enthusiasm for the Ubuntu Juju project, developed by Canonical, the company that makes Ubuntu.</p>
<p>Brian is a good friend that has been advising us on all matters TurnKey practically since the project began. His advice and feedback is always well informed and insightful so even when I already have my own opinions on the matter, I still take the time to look into his suggestions carefully. Thanks Brian!</p>
<p>This time, Brian wrote in to share that he&#39;s been enjoying his (impressive) Juju experience and sent a few links for us to look at. He also asked:</p>
<blockquote>Have you guys ever thought of creating Juju Charm&#39;s for all of the TurnKeyLinux apps?</blockquote>
<p>The first thing I looked at was whether I could use Juju without using Ubuntu. Not really, and that&#39;s a major dealbreaker because TurnKey is based on Debian. It used to be based on Ubuntu but a few years after we started TurnKey it became increasingly clear that we made the wrong decision. Debian was superior on so many levels: community, security, stability, packaging quality and most importantly - the fundamental driving values. So we bit the bullet and <a href="http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/turnkey-12">moved over to Debian in 2012</a>.</p>
<p>I figured a somewhat expanded version of my answer to Brian could start an interesting discussion so I&#39;m posting it to the blog. In a nutshell, I&#39;m trying to explain why I think many in the free software community are not terribly enthusiastic about building on top of Canonical&#39;s work and why Ubuntu seems to have lost so much ground as the world&#39;s favorite Linux distro.</p>
<p>In 2008, when Alon and I started TurnKey, Ubuntu was at its height. Here are the <a href="https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=ubuntu&amp;date=1%2F2008%2079m&amp;cmpt=q">Google Trends for Ubuntu</a> since:</p>
<p><img alt="" src="http://www.turnkeylinux.org/files/images/blog/ubuntu-google-trends_0.png" style="line-height:1.5em" /></p>
<p>Ouch. What happened? My response to Brian tells a small part of this story.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Brian, thanks for prompting me to take another look at Juju today. We are evaluating several directions for TurnKey 14, which we will be re-engineering to work as a collection of modular services built on top of Core rather than monolithic system images. We&#39;re going to try and avoid reinventing the wheel as much as possible by leveraging the best components.</p>
<p>Juju is an option but to be honest it&#39;s probably not the leading horse in the race, and sadly that has more to do with the track record of the company backing it then any technical fault. In the context of the free software community, getting the answers right at the technical level is almost never enough. Collaborating successfully with the broader ecosystem and winning over hearts and minds matters. A lot.</p>
<p>At this point, Juju doesn&#39;t seem to support Debian at all. Debian have even removed the Juju client from sid for some reason. Not sure what the story behind that is. Given the growing divergence between Ubuntu and Debian, we can&#39;t expect to be able to leverage the Juju Ubuntu charms without some serious forking.</p>
<p>More importantly, we don&#39;t want to back the wrong horse. Canonical have a bad case of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here">not-invented-here syndrome</a> and a tendency to not really listen to the community. They&#39;re like the Apple of the FLOSS world except that Shuttleworth is no Steve Jobs and I mean that both in a good way (not as much of an asshole) and a bad way (not as good a leader/visionary).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Brian responded by defending Canonical and explaining that from his perspective working with the world&#39;s largest service providers Canonical was making impressive in-roads, especially in the enterprise and cloud arena.</p>
<p>Brian is the expert here so I&#39;m in no position to argue, and to be honest rereading the email I sent him it did come off as a bit more anti-Canonical / Ubuntu than I intended. But my main point wasn&#39;t that Canonical is a bad company or that Ubuntu sucks, just that what happens in Ubuntu stays in Ubuntu. Maybe that&#39;s great for Canonical in the Enterprise space, but it makes building on their work a shaky proposition.</p>
<h2>Boldly going where no man wants to go after</h2>
<p>Canonical has a special talent for either backing the wrong horse, or breeding it.&nbsp; A few examples of Canonical&#39;s track record:</p>
<ul>
<li>UEC vs OpenStack</li>
<li>Bazaar vs Git</li>
<li>Upstart vs systemd</li>
<li>Launchpad vs github</li>
<li>Unity vs gnome</li>
<li>mir vs wayland</li>
</ul>
<p>Given this track record, a Canonical backed project is an unlikely winner in any race for widespread adoption. You&#39;d think&nbsp;they would win some battles just by chance.&nbsp;What&#39;s going on?&nbsp;</p>
<p>My pet theory is that it has to be a mix of reasons:&nbsp;They don&#39;t listen. They don&#39;t inspire. They don&#39;t make the best stuff. They don&#39;t have the best people. They don&#39;t have the most money or the best business.</p>
<div>They do good work, and provide nice solutions, but for some reason we never seem to see those solutions adopted outside of Ubuntu by the wider Linux community. If you aren&#39;t already in the Ubuntu camp it seems short-sighted to back their projects.&nbsp;</div>
<p>I don&#39;t think that Canonical is bad at what it does. It&#39;s just that they&#39;re rarely the best and being mediocre (or even second best) isn&#39;t good enough when the tournament effect is at work. The winner takes home the pot (e.g., becomes the new standard) and Canonical isn&#39;t winning.</p>
<p>I&#39;m not even sure they want to. I mean, does Apple want Firewire to become a standard? But Apple can afford to create its own standards. Can Canonical?</p>
<h2>If companies were text editors, Canonical would be Emacs</h2>
<p>Canonical is not a company driven by the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well. If companies were text editors, Canonical would be Emacs.</p>
<p>It&#39;s easy to lose count of the many different&nbsp; directions they seem to be trying to go in at once: Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu Phone, Ubuntu Tablet, and Ubuntu TV. Oh my! I&#39;m waiting for them to announce the Ubuntu gaming system and Ubuntu car.&nbsp;</p>
<p>I&#39;m impressed (and slightly fearful) by the way companies like Google have expanded their business, but Google waited until they were wildly profitable with their core product to do that. I&#39;m no expert but having your fingers in so many pies when your company <a href="http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat-Bruce-Byfield-s-Blog/Reading-the-tea-leaves-with-Canonical-s-financial-statement">is still losing money a decade after its creation</a> doesn&#39;t seem like sound business strategy.</p>
<p>And then there are the various community antagonizing fiascos that left me wondering how they didn&#39;t see it coming:</p>
<ul>
<li>Sending Unity searches to Canonical (they&#39;ve since fixed that)</li>
<li>Inserting Amazon product referrals into the desktop experience (they&#39;ve since made it opt-in)</li>
</ul>
<p>Sure they came to their senses, but as the old saying goes: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.</p>
<h2>How much does Canonical really care about free software values?</h2>
<p>Here&#39;s another thing that bugs me. It&#39;s unclear how much Shuttleworth/Canonical genuinely cares about the underlying values of free software. From the outside it looks like Canonical is firmly rooted in the &quot;commercial open source&quot; camp as opposed to the &quot;free software&quot; camp (<a href="http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/standing-up-for-freedom">what&#39;s the difference?</a>). This is reflected in a tendency towards technical isolation and the design of solutions that encourage dependence on Canonical services.</p>
<p>The focus is on utility and convenience, not values. And to clarify what I mean by that - a value is a principle you would hold onto even if you get penalized for it by the marketplace. If you give lip service to a value but are willing to give it up to make more money that&#39;s not a value - that&#39;s marketing.</p>
<p>I&#39;m not saying Canonical&#39;s focus on convenience and utility are bad. It&#39;s just not inspiring. And you need to be inspiring to lead.</p>
<p>Still, they do a lot of good work and have done much to popularize free software. We should congratulate them for that and be thankful that Shuttleworth decided to invest his millions to create the company. There&#39;s definitely a useful place for a company like Canonical in the ecosystem. Ubuntu provides a gentler introduction to the sometimes harsh world of free software. It&#39;s&nbsp;especially useful to the vast majority of &quot;<em>human beings&quot;</em> who aren&#39;t aware that free software has anything else to offer beyond the magic of getting stuff for free. Who knows, some of them may eventually pull back the curtain.</p>
<p>But it takes more then being useful to lead and Canonical&#39;s take on free software is just not very inspiring for developers and would-be contributors, many of whom, like myself, do care deeply about values. What you do is important, but why you do it is even more important.</p>
<p>Free software is more than a better way to develop software, and more than a way to get stuff for free. <a href="http://www.turnkeylinux.org/faq#t597n15822">Free software is about freedom</a>. The more technologically dependent our society becomes, the more free software values matter because technology is a double edged sword. It can be used to strengthen our freedoms, or take them away.</p>
<p>We need utility as a measuring stick, and the right values as our compass. It&#39;s not one or the other. We need both.</p>
<p>Which reminds me of a pearl of wisdom I came across that keeps reverberating in my head:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Develop people, not products.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Update</strong>: it seems some Ubuntu people took my post very personally. See the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/ubuntu-not-invented-here-syndrome#comment-20875">clarification of the intention behind this post</a>. No harm intended.</p>
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/ubuntu-not-invented-here-syndrome#commentscanonicalcommunityfree softwarenihrantubuntuvaluesWed, 30 Jul 2014 21:49:58 +0000Liraz Siri15916 at http://www.turnkeylinux.orgStanding up for free software, a free Internet and a free societyhttp://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/standing-up-for-freedom
<p>Six years ago, <a href="http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/first-announcement">in the fall of 2008</a>, Alon and I started TurnKey GNU/Linux inspired by a belief in the democratizing power of free software (free as in speech, not beer), like science, to promote the progress of a free &amp; humane society.</p>
<p>Last year&#39;s &quot;summer of Snowden&quot; got me thinking about what sort of role free software software (and by modest extension TurnKey) should play in taking back the Internet from those who would turn it from a tool of freedom <a href="http://www.wired.com/2013/11/this-is-how-the-internet-backbone-has-been-turned-into-a-weapon/">into a weapon</a>.</p>
<p>I realized many of us in the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software">free software</a> community had been lulled to sleep due to the tremendous success that free software has had in the past two decades. We won didn&#39;t we? After all the Internet, together with the free software that powers it, is one of the greatest victories for human freedom in history. Great! So nothing to see here, move along...</p>
<p>Except we only won a few battles. We didn&#39;t win the war. Our hard earned freedoms are now more than ever under intense attack. Powerful forces are continually plotting new ways of <a href="https://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/ubuntu-not-invented-here-syndrome#centralizing-power">luring us into closed, centralized systems</a> under their arbitrary control, tempting us (to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin) to give up essential liberty in order to purchase a little temporary convenience and safety.</p>
<p>This makes free software and the values it embodies <a href="https://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/ubuntu-not-invented-here-syndrome#floss-relevant">more important now than ever</a> lest the very technologies we developed with the dream of creating a better, more open, humane and egalitarian society be turned against us. We the people, need to take a stand.</p>
<p>With that in mind we recently began referring to TurnKey Linux as TurnKey GNU/Linux - to symbolically show TurnKey&#39;s solidarity with the core ideals spearheaded by the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>, founded by Richard Stallman.</p>
<p>Many have criticized Stallman for being too extreme and polarizing. For not bending his values to conform with reality. For being a hopeless idealist. In 1998, several such pragmatists founded the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Initiative">Open Source Initiative</a>&nbsp;in order to rebrand &quot;<em>free software&quot;</em> as &quot;<em>open source software</em>&quot; with the idea:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with &#39;free software&#39; in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To be honest, for many years I viewed this as a non-issue. A pointless semantic storm in a teacup. I considered &quot;<em>open source</em>&quot; and &quot;<em>free software</em>&quot; interchangeable and usually just defaulted to speaking of &quot;open source software&quot; with people who I believed might get confused by the &quot;free&quot; part.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>No no, free software is free as in free speech, not free beer. It&#39;s about freedom, not price!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Using the term &quot;<em>open source software</em>&quot; sidelined the issue neatly.</p>
<p>Except it didn&#39;t. Open source was all about utility, a means to an ends. &nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos">Logos</a>&nbsp;-&nbsp;as the greek philosophers would say. What end was being pursued didn&#39;t matter.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Free software on the other hand was all about values. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethos">Ethos</a>&nbsp;- ethics, character. If you begin from the end, values are what you start out with. Then you set goals. After that you know where you want to go and you need to figure out the best way to get there - that&#39;s utility. Values are the roots, utility the leaves.</p>
<p>Richard Stallman does a good job of explaining the difference in his essay &quot;<a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html">Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software</a>&quot;.</p>
<p>Values, above mere utility are at the heart of any worthwhile mission. It explains why we care about free software, our vision for the future, and why we&#39;re only just getting started:</p>
<p>Quoting from <a class="reference external" href="http://www.turnkeylinux.org/help/dev" style="line-height: 1.5em;">http://www.turnkeylinux.org/help/dev</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We want to work and play in a free Internet, under our terms, our rights and liberties intact. They want us depending on a nebulous &quot;cloud&quot; forever beyond our control, under their thumb, playing by their rules, trapped in a virtual panopticon that allows shadowy government agencies to spy and archive our digital thoughts in mass warrantless surveillance programs, turning the Internet from a tool of freedom into a weapon.</p>
<p>As renowned security expert Bruce Schneier puts it: &quot;We need to take back the internet, and by we, I mean the engineering community.&quot;</p>
<p>A rare minority of would-be heros have the right combination of skills, means and motivation to fight back. Imagine if we could bottle up their IT superpowers and mass produce it into secure, convenient solutions mere mortals could use. Even experts would benefit. Discovering, configuring and testing combinations of free software components can be notoriously challenging, time consuming and inefficient, especially if everyone keeps reinventing the wheel by rolling their own solutions.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Update 2014/08/02:</strong> I expanded on the subject in a later somewhat <a href="https://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/ubuntu-not-invented-here-syndrome#comment-20875">controversial blog post</a> that calls Ubuntu to take a more inspiring, values oriented approach to free software.</p>
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/standing-up-for-freedom#commentsfree softwarefreedomfsfgnuvaluesWed, 09 Jul 2014 13:28:07 +0000Liraz Siri15821 at http://www.turnkeylinux.orgWhat's the best way to do free software bounties?http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/best-way-to-do-bounties
<p>First, I&#39;d like to thank Joey, Noah and Jeremy for providing much needed feedback on a <a href="http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/financial-rewards-pros-cons-alternatives">related blog post</a>. Thanks guys. It really got me thinking. What if instead of a contest we figured out how to do community funded bounties? Wouldn&#39;t an open, continual system of <a href="https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software">free software</a> bounties be much a better idea than doing another contest?</p>
<p>In contrast to a contest, bounties would open up both the funding and the funded goals to the community. Everyone could vote with their wallets for specific goals they&#39;d like to see accomplished. Rather than dictating from above Alon and I could participate in the process on the ground level (e.g., starting new bounties or supporting community created bounties).</p>
<p>There wouldn&#39;t have to be be winners and losers. If multiple people or teams collaborate on a solution to a bounty we could divide it amongst them.</p>
<p>To be frank the more I think about it the more my enthusiasm for TurnKey sponsored contests diminishes. The main problems with contests is that they&#39;re <strong>top down</strong> (I.e., funding and direction is dictated from the top) and <strong>reward competition instead of rewarding collaboration</strong>. You get what you reward.</p>
<p>By not rewarding the right thing, a contest would discourage rather than encourage the spirit of win/win collaboration that is critical for the long-term success of TurnKey as a true free software project.</p>
<p>Sure, figuring out how to do The Right Thing may be more difficult than going for the low hanging fruit but it would pay off in the long term.</p>
<p>Something about this idea really excites me.</p>
<p>What do you think? What would be the best way to implement a system of free software bounties?</p>
<h2>Backstory</h2>
<p>For those of you who haven&#39;t been following developments, last year we squeezed our build infrastructure into a <a href="http://www.turnkeylinux.org/tkldev">single self-contained system image</a>. We want to see more people in the Debian / free software community using this because we believe it could do a lot of good, not just for TurnKey based solutions but for any Debian based project.</p>
<p>In fact, we&#39;d like everybody who could find this useful to know about it and use it, even if they don&#39;t contribute anything back to TurnKey: <a href="http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/developers-developers-developers">what if all Debian/Ubuntu based dists used TKLDev?</a></p>
<p>Note that this is what Alon and I actually use to maintain all 100+ apps in TurnKey. Without all of the automation in our build system that wouldn&#39;t be remotely possible. Nobody could pull it off. There&#39;s just way too much work. But the system we&#39;ve developed makes maintaining a ready-to-use Debian system template as easy (sometimes easier) as maintaining a single Debian package.</p>
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/best-way-to-do-bounties#commentscommunityfree softwaretkldevFri, 11 Apr 2014 08:44:19 +0000Liraz Siri15377 at http://www.turnkeylinux.orgFor great justice: all your criticism are belong to us!http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/for-great-justice
<p>I started writing this blog post as a comment to forum discussion that really got me thinking titled &quot;<a href="http://www.turnkeylinux.org/forum/general/20121016/state-turnkey-users-viewpoint">State of TurnKey from a users viewpoint</a>&quot;. Many thanks to Eric, Jeremy and Carl for their insightful and thought provoking comments. I&#39;ve decided to post my response on the blog to draw attention to the discussion. I believe it reflects what many of you in the community must be thinking and I&#39;m hoping to hear more people voice their opinions on the matter.</p>
<h2>
Our critics are our best friends (and vice versa)</h2>
<p>I&#39;m humbled when people care enough about what we&#39;re doing to take the time to share their thoughts in detail. I usually don&#39;t have a lot of free time on my hands. I know most of you are like that as well so I really appreciate it when somebody goes out of there way to give us a &quot;piece of their mind&quot;. Even when it&#39;s critical and not nearly as flattering as I might like.</p>
<p>Many thanks to all of you for the honest constructive criticism, as well as the help and encouragement. I believe TurnKey ultimately benefits from that.</p>
<p>What really pains me that I don&#39;t have the time to respond to each and every point and idea raised by everyone in the community individually. That doesn&#39;t mean a discussion, your input, feedback and ideas aren&#39;t extremely useful. You strengthen our resolve, heighten the sense of urgency and dig deeper into important paths of thought even when you aren&#39;t breaking new ground, even in cases when we have already mentally explored some of the same paths you have suggested.</p>
<h2>
Brainstorming our way to greater glory</h2>
<p>Behind the scenes, Alon and I have these regular brainstorming sessions that often last hours. We talk about the community&#39;s feedback, throw ideas out there, discuss the pros and cons of this priority vs that and ultimately decide what we need to focus on to get TurnKey to the next level. Then we stick with it. At least until the next brainstorming session.</p>
<p>Our last brainstorming was about a month ago. We have a lot on our plate just keeping the metaphorical trains going at TurnKey but with regards to new developments we resolved to focus on 64-bit support, productizing a prototype of the TurnKey Desktop system, RCs for the next Debian release wheezy, and creating a TurnKey factory &quot;meta-appliance&quot; that would be capable of building TurnKey products from public source code (e.g., on GitHub).</p>
<h2>
Red Queen&#39;s race</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>&quot;Well, in our country,&quot; said Alice, still panting a little, &quot;you&#39;d generally get to somewhere else &mdash; if you run very fast for a long time, as we&#39;ve been doing.&quot;</p>
<p>&quot;A slow sort of country!&quot; said the Queen. &quot;Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!&quot;</p>
<p class="attribution">&mdash;Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We can&#39;t make progress on all the items and issues raised by the community as quickly as we&#39;d like to. We&#39;re doing our best, and in a way we&#39;ve been both successful and victims of our success. So far we&#39;ve managed to keep TurnKey on its feet while continuing to make progress with a ridiculously small amount of resources, but there&#39;s a price to pay...</p>
<p>What I don&#39;t think we fully appreciated when we began is how much time and energy it would take to keep the project in roughly the same place. Communicating with our users and partners, maintaining the project&#39;s infrastructure, tracking API changes, bugfixing, and maintaining the existing library of solutions. All of that could easily take over 100% of our time without leaving time and energy to push the project forward.</p>
<p>It always comes back to the resources we have to work with. What we have is never enough.</p>
<h2>
Great things come from small beginnings</h2>
<p>A few years ago when the project was just starting out it was several orders of magnitude less complex. It was a small, fun little side project. Just a couple of products. A handful of very undemanding users. Very simple infrastructure. Not too many opportunities. A lot of ideas on where this could go, but no pressure. Nearly every user that commented on the forum got a personal reply from me. It was wonderful to receive even a trickle of interest from the outside world. People all over the outside world in fact!</p>
<p>TurnKey was small, not very demanding and it usually didn&#39;t feel like we were neglecting anything important.</p>
<h2>
Choose your battles</h2>
<p>A few years later TurnKey had ballooned in size and complexity. There&#39;s now much more important stuff to get done than we could ever hope to achieve without increasing our manpower and resources several times over.</p>
<p>So it&#39;s become a very unfortunate fact of life that some important things are not going to get done, or not going to get done as quickly as we&#39;d like. This means many great opportunities are lost and many great ideas and even great people are not going to get the attention they deserve from us.</p>
<p>We&#39;d like to do everything, talk to everyone, go in all directions at once - then reality intervenes and forces us to pick our battles.</p>
<p>There&#39;s no magic way to change this, but we do believe there is a real, pragmatic path to meaningful change that doesn&#39;t involve us &quot;selling out&quot; and turning TurnKey into a full-fledged business backed by outside investors, with everything that comes with that (good and bad).</p>
<h2>
If you love somebody, set them free</h2>
<p>In a nutshell, our plan is to tough it out and do whatever it takes to keep TurnKey alive and kicking while radically open up the project&#39;s development to the community. Then gradually getting various stakeholders interested in helping out and multiplying the resources the project has to work with.</p>
<p>In other words turning TurnKey into something more resembling a truly free open source project with a living kicking screaming community behind it bearing most of the burden involved in churning out more turnk-key open source solutions of ever higher quality.</p>
<p>It&#39;s a tall order, but we&#39;re in this for the long haul. Even if it takes another couple years to get there, we&#39;re fine with that.</p>
<h2>
More important than money?!</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>&quot;Making money isn&#39;t hard in itself... What&#39;s hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one&#39;s life to.&quot;</p>
<p class="attribution">&mdash;Carlos Ruiz Zaf&oacute;n</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We&#39;ve come to understand (the hard way) how important it is to become financially sustainable and have sources of revenue. Thank goodness we can pay the rent now while working on TurnKey full-time. But this isn&#39;t about the money for us. We want TurnKey to be more of an open source project that has a little side business going than a business that has a little open source project going. As far as we&#39;re concerned the business stuff should just another piece of infrastructure that helps keep TurnKey ticking. Like our servers. It shouldn&#39;t be the focal point and it should serve the open source project rather than other way around.</p>
<p>We do need to grow the team and bring more full-time people on board and that requires expanding our sources of revenue. But ultimately what we want our team to be doing is supporting a rich, vibrant community that celebrates open source. Not &quot;maximizing shareholder value&quot;. We think there&#39;s a way to do that that isn&#39;t based on wishful thinking and open source pixie dust, but only time will tell if we&#39;re right.</p>
<p>In the meantime if we want to hold on to our somewhat ideal, naive notions we have to stay in control. That means going against the flow, ignoring the siren call of investors and doing stuff with our own time, on our own dime. We pay for that by going slower, but in our minds that&#39;s a small price to pay for staying true to ourselves and to the open source spirit that led us to found TurnKey in the first place.</p>
<p>I agree wholeheartedly there&#39;s a tremendous amount of room for improvement. By all means voice your opinions, ideas and criticism. We read everything, even when we don't have time to respond. </p><p>Bear with us: from where I'm looking there are some very exciting times ahead as we lay the critical pieces in place required to unlock TurnKey&#39;s true potential. We&#39;re working on that right now. We still have some hidden aces to play that we hope will delight our users and the open source community. I&#39;d share more details except that we&#39;ve made enough public promises that I&#39;m worried of breaking so I won&#39;t make the situation worse by making even more of those. For now let&#39;s just say we&#39;re making good progress on a lot of stuff behind the &quot;core&quot; event horizon and we are feeling very optimistic about TurnKey&#39;s prospects for the future. Stay tuned!</p>
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/for-great-justice#commentsbusinessfree softwaregift cultureFri, 19 Oct 2012 04:50:10 +0000Liraz Siri4265 at http://www.turnkeylinux.orgBe nice. It's a fscking gifthttp://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/be-nice-its-a-gift
<p>
Open source development is usually fun and rewarding. You get to work on whatever you like. No permission required. No &quot;business justification&quot;. Here&#39;s this thing I&#39;ve created, isn&#39;t it neat? There&#39;s a deep sense of satisfaction in making things. Especially when other people find them useful. It&#39;s also pretty awesome when people decide what you&#39;ve made is interesting enough that they want to join in and help make it better. Successful projects often form into communities. Strangers from all over the world turned into enthusiastic users, co-developers. Friends.</p>
<p>
The only parts that suck are that:</p>
<ol class="arabic simple">
<li>
It is a bit more difficult to make a living purely from open source software. Giving stuff away generally doesn&#39;t pay very well.</li>
<li>
Some people just don&#39;t get it.</li>
</ol>
<!--break-->
<p>
For example, a while back someone who shall remained unnamed started e-mailing us privately with complaints that <a href="http://www.turnkeylinux.org/tklbam">TKLBAM</a> (TurnKey&#39;s Backup and Migration software) didn&#39;t work right for him. We eventually traced the problem back to a MySQL memory usage issue. It turns out that in some, thankfully rare situations MySQL consumes way too much memory when you restore a very particular kind of database from a mysqldump.</p>
<p>
When the user complained this was &quot;a fault of TKLBAM&#39;s design&quot; I explained that it really didn&#39;t sound like a TKLBAM problem to me because:</p>
<ol class="arabic simple">
<li>
If you peeled off TKLBAM and just used mysqldump / mysql command directly to backup / restore that kind of database you would run into exactly the same memory usage issue.</li>
<li>
If Ubuntu issued a package update that fixed the bug, the issue would go away. Presto. No TKLBAM fix required.</li>
</ol>
<p>
Besides, even if this wasn&#39;t a rare edge case nobody else had run into there probably wasn&#39;t much I could do about it without debugging MySQL code - a daunting task.</p>
<p>
The best I could do was add an item to my todo list to see if we could look for workarounds that would go into the next version. In the meantime I recommended that the user try using another solution.</p>
<p>
Then I went on vacation. When I came back online I discovered an escalating series of e-mails from this user that eventually culminated in threats if we didn&#39;t drop everything to meet his demands. And this was no joke. This guy seemed to be dead serious!</p>
<p>
Alon, who peaks into my TurnKey e-mail inbox when I&#39;m not around tried calming the guy down:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
Just so you know, Liraz has been working offline and on vacation for about a month, if not a little longer. He has not been ignoring you, he just hasn&#39;t read your emails.</p>
<p>
I can understand your frustration, but even so keep in mind that TLKBAM is open source software, and released under the GPL!</p>
<p>
I&#39;m sure Liraz will reply to you once he returns online and finds the time, but even then understand that there is no obligation on his part to do so, except for common courtesy. Making threats is just disrespectful and wasteful.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Another demanding, entitled rant followed. When I finally came back I read through the whole series of e-mails, thought a little bit about what kind of confusion could lead to the (thankfully rare) behavior we were witnessing and put in my final response:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
Sorry for the late reply and sorry for the bad experience you have had with TKLBAM.</p>
<p>
As Alon said I&#39;ve been offline for a while. As much as I&#39;d like to help you in a friendly manner I&#39;m getting the sneaking sensation from the demanding tone of your messages that you don&#39;t seem to understand how open source works.</p>
<p>
The way I see it open source is basically a gift culture where people give the products of their labor away in a vague hope that some people (but probably not everyone) will find it useful. It&#39;s a gift, with everything that implies. There are no warranties, explicit or implied. There are no guarantees that it is fit for any purpose.</p>
<p>
Even proprietary software you pay for is not guaranteed to fully satisfy you or to work flawlessly (it usually doesn&#39;t). The only way to really guarantee that technology works like you want is either to take pains to develop it yourself or pay someone else to develop it for you, in which case you can boss them around when they don&#39;t meet your expectations or schedule. For what it&#39;s worth I am prepared to offer you a full refund for the free software. :)</p>
<p>
Seriously though I do appreciate the technical feedback but please remember that the open source license gives you permission to copy, distribute and improve TKLBAM yourself if you ever feel I am not responsive enough to your needs.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
I don&#39;t know what I was expecting. A sudden moral epiphany? &quot;Sorry I got carried away&quot;. I know I know, I probably shouldn&#39;t have bothered. Once a person gets so far out of whack it&#39;s unlikely they are interested in being sensible. But I&#39;m a sucker for redemption. Anyhow, it certainly didn&#39;t help. A couple of additional e-mails with further demands and threats followed. Oh well, at least I tried.</p>
<p>
The moral of the story: Come on, be nice. It&#39;s a fscking gift!</p>
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/be-nice-its-a-gift#commentscourtesyfree softwaregift cultureno warrantyTue, 01 Nov 2011 01:24:30 +0000Liraz Siri2754 at http://www.turnkeylinux.orgIs selling / monetizing open source a zero sum game?http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/selling-open-source
<p>
Most of the feedback users send to us privately is good, but not all of it. We do get some negative feedback every now and then, though we try not to get too worked up about it. In a way negative feedback is good too, because at least a user cared enough to bother to shed light on an issue that was troubling them. We can (and do) resolve most issues users commonly report to us by making technical fixes to TurnKey, but sometimes users complain about things we can&#39;t change. Except perhaps to try and explain our thinking better.</p>
<p>
For example, shortly after we came out with a TKLBAM related announcement, one user sent us a private e-mail with the following complaint:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
TKLBAM is not anything I would be interested in ever. I do not want to jump to conclusions as I love the work you are doing but are you somehow sponsored by Amazon? I have no desire to use another company&#39;s cloud.</p>
<p>
I hope you move onto other things soon and move away from what at least to me seems like the end of your open source days and moving to making money.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
I responded as follows:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
Thanks for your feedback. We&#39;re not currently sponsored by Amazon, though it would be nice if we were!</p>
<p>
We started with support for Amazon Web Services because they&#39;re the leading public cloud vendor and have the richest API. In the future we&#39;d like to support other public clouds and eventually private clouds as well.</p>
<p>
Also, you don&#39;t have to use Amazon if you don&#39;t want to. If you read the FAQ carefully you&#39;ll notice that TKLBAM works with any storage target you want (e.g., filesystem, NFS, rsync, SSH, etc.). It&#39;s just a bit more difficult to use without the cloud infrastructure.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
I can understand how some people aren&#39;t too enthusiastic about the whole cloud concept. I personally don&#39;t think we should view the cloud as the end-all solution for all computing woes, but rather as another tool in our belt. A tool with pros and cons. Like any other.</p>
<p>
Also, that <a href="http://www.turnkeylinux.org/tklbam">TKLBAM</a><a href="http://www.turnkeylinux.org/tklbam"> (TurnKey Backups)</a> supposedly depends on using Amazon (<a href="http://www.turnkeylinux.org/faq/do-i-have-use-amazon-s3-storage">it doesn&#39;t</a>) is a common misunderstanding. I can sympathize with confused users on that account.</p>
<p>
What really puzzled me was that it sounded like our user was inherently hostile to the notion that an open source project could have any sources of revenue to sustain it at all, as if business and open source were two opposing sides in a zero-sum equation.</p>
<p>
But most open source projects are funded by providing various commercial services (e.g., support, training, customization) to large companies. That&#39;s where the money is. Most large companies wouldn&#39;t touch a solution that wasn&#39;t commercially backed somehow. They just don&#39;t get how that could work.</p>
<p>
So I have a hard time imagining any individual, regardless of political bent, being ideologically opposed to the funding of open source software by for-profit entities. It makes about as much sense to me as being opposed to business funding of common-good causes such as environmental protection.</p>
<p>
In my opinion, this sort of &quot;us vs them&quot; thinking is so out of touch with reality it&#39;s not even wrong.</p>
<p>
To the best of my knowledge there&#39;s nothing inherent about open source that makes it incompatible with business. Companies such as RedHat, Canonical are good examples of how you can make it work. There are many others.</p>
<p>
We&#39;ve come a long way since Eric Raymond explained how open source works to the business world in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar">the Cathedral and the Bazaar</a>. Today most open source code is written by developers who write open source software for a living. That implies employers who view open source development as financially sustainable. It&#39;s a win-win situation, not a zero-sum game.</p>
<p>
The end result is more people working on open source full-time, more open source software, and a richer ecosystem. It&#39;s not a pie that needs to be divided, but a tide of technological wealth that lifts all boats. How can this be a bad thing? Even Richard Stallman the Free Software Foundation, free software purists, encourage people <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html">to earn a living from&nbsp; open source software</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible &mdash; just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.</p>
<p>
Actually, we encourage people who redistribute <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">free software</a> to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.</p>
<p>
The word &ldquo;free&rdquo; has two legitimate general meanings; it can refer either to freedom or to price. When we speak of &ldquo;free software&rdquo;, we&#39;re talking about freedom, not price. (Think of &ldquo;free speech&rdquo;, not &ldquo;free beer&rdquo;.) Specifically, it means that a user is free to run the program, change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
That&#39;s reasonable enough. Open source developers need to pay rent and buy groceries too after all.</p>
<p>
My personal take on this is that it can be highly beneficial, especially for large open source projects to have some kind of business model. Otherwise there is a strict limit to how much resources you can put in. Having a way to pay the bills is a good way to ensure long term sustainability.</p>
<p>
The tricky part is finding just the right balance between commercial interests and open source ideals. Many projects that give commercial open source software a bad name fail to find the right balance and lose the community&#39;s trust as a result. In the long term this can be fatal because engaging the community is essential for a successful open source project. Otherwise you get all of the disadvantages of proprietary software (e.g., no outside contributors) with none of the advantages (e.g., various &quot;IP&quot; protections).</p>
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/selling-open-source#commentsbusinessfree softwarephilosophyTue, 25 Oct 2011 15:15:14 +0000Liraz Siri2800 at http://www.turnkeylinux.org